An internet search engine is a gateway to the immense amount of information available on the Web. Search engines are very efficient at providing users with access to a staggering quantity of information in the form of search results. The user, however, is often more interested in the relevancy of the search results, rather than the quantity of the search results.
Search engines are keyword-driven. Referring to FIG. 1 there is shown a basic block diagram of a generalized search system 100. A very abbreviated overview of the working of a search engines is as follows: a user inputs a string of one or more characters representing a keyword 103 or set of keywords, separated by delimiters such as spaces or commas, into a search site on available on the user's web browser 102. The search engine 104 then processes the keywords as a search query by parsing and indexing. Next the search engine 104 accesses multiple indices or references 108 throughout the Internet for “matches” and returns any matches found as one or more “hits” on a search result page (SRP) 120. These hits are pages of interest provided from the millions of pages that are available on the Web.
A search hit is an atomic unit that the search engine 104 identifies as matching the criteria defined by the search query. These hits are presented to the user as search results, but the “hits” may not be what the user had in mind. This presents one of the most formidable challenges faced by search engines today—discovering the intent of the query in order to provide a more meaningful search result. This challenge arises due to two fundamental limitations of the current state-of-art: 1) by using keywords, the user can say only so much about what he/she expects from the search engine; and 2) an average user may not know the correct kind of keywords to use and the advanced tweaks to get the results he/she wants.
For example, some search providers feature additional pages on their website to which a user can navigate for more relevant search results. For example, a user can input the search term “World Cup 2010” on the Yahoo! website at www.yahoo.com and be presented with multiple search results. However, a more rewarding search experience awaits the user who navigates to the Yahoo! Sports page at http://sports.search.yahoo.com and enters the same search term. Not every user however, knows how to access these more content-rich pages available on the sidelines of the main search page, but it is certain that every user would prefer more relevant search results.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method to overcome the above-stated shortcomings of the known art.